hugh's comments

I haven't listened to any of them yet, but I am surprised by how few there are. There's only one Chopin-like piece, for instance. This causes me to worry: how many bad Chopin-like pieces did this thing spit out before coming up with a passable one? If there's still a human intelligence sitting there and sorting the good compositions from the bad ones, the program is significantly less impressive.

Seriously though, I would be very sad if internal combustion engine powered cars vanished. I personally suspect that the future of personal transportation is still gonna be based on liquid fuels (maybe cellulosic or even algae-derived ethanol) because they're so much easier to store and transport than anything else.

Hydrogen storage requires weird high-pressure containers and exotic materials. Electricity storage requires weird toxic metals placed in weird toxic solutions. Ethanol storage requires a bucket.

Anyone got any good numbers on questions like: if half of California's cars were switched to electrical over the next ten years, how many more power stations would the state require?

Four seconds of googling turns up: http://obesity1.tempdomainname.com/subs/fastfacts/obesity_wo...

see Table 3. The prevalence of obesity (as of 1999-2000) increases from 23% in the twenties to 42% in the fifties, and declines after that.

Because sexuality is so entangled with power in American culture, it's hard to talk about sex without getting political. The two are nearly inseparable to Republicans especially, as has been demonstrated repeatedly in their opposition to "non-traditional marriage" (only a near-complete ignorance of the history of marriage could lead one to think what we have now is "traditional"), Senator Craig's "wide stance" in the bathroom stall, and their glee in bringing down Bill Clinton over his "unnatural acts."

which is just plain odd, because that's the one and only time politics is mentioned in either article.

Now we've got that out of the way, why is it that every writeup of some social science research must have at least one glaring factor that's been ignored? In this case it's:

There is a significant difference, however, on whether they have ever had sexual intercourse with men. Overweight (92.5%) and obese (91.5%) women are significantly more likely ever to have had sexual intercourse with men than normal-weight women (87.4%).

Is this primarily due to the fact that women get fatter as they get older and hence the overweight/obese group is overloaded with the women at the high end of the (15-44) age range? Probably.

Also this bit:

When a man propositions a woman, she can respond in one of two ways; she can say “yes” or she can say “no.” When a woman propositions a man, he can also respond in one of two ways; he can say “yes” or he can say “yes, please.” He has no realistic choice to say no.

thankfully is not true. Yeech!

It is probably true, however, that women at the low end of the attractiveness spectrum have a much easier time of it than men at the low end of the attractiveness spectrum, thanks to the relative abundance of non-picky men compared to non-picky women.

I think it's a rather silly analysis. Firstly, for the whole premise:

This might be the key passage of my interview with John Ziegler on Tuesday, for it is, in a nutshell, why conservatives don't win elections anymore.

By "conservatives don't win elections any more" he means that they've lost two congressional elections in a row. And one Presidential election. That's not a death of anything, that's just a normal part of the political cycle.

Secondly, for his proposed reason:

There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.

And that's supposed to be unique to conservatives how? Being unable to believe that others don't think the way you do is extremely common on both sides of politics. Working at a university as I do, the left-wing equivalent is almost ubiquitous among just about everybody I talk to on a day-to-day basis.

Was that a deliberately mixed metaphor? Turn around a sinking ship and all you get is a wreck which faces in the other direction.

That's the problem: interesting data points become anecdotes while uninteresting data points don't, which is why you can't reconstruct the data from the anecdotes.

Drat.

(quick googling)

Oh, they already exist. Has anyone ever used one? They're three hundred bucks, so I'm not gonna buy one just to try it out and see if I like it.

Margaret Thatcher also had a chemistry background (though only a Bachelors, unlike Merkel's PhD).